Securing Tar Sands Circulation: Risk, Affect, and Anticipating the Line 9 Reversal

Abstract

It's not a question of whether a spill happens-only when", rings an oft-repeated slogan of oil pipeline opponents in Eastern Canada. Meanwhile, pipeline proponents are adamant that Canada must either "pipe or perish". Through a case study of a controversial tar sands pipeline project (the Line 9 reversal), this paper examines the workings of risk in environmental politics. I explore the similar anticipatory logics that undergird both support for and opposition to the Line 9 reversal, and query the blurry lines between environmental precaution and security preemption. I ask what a preoccupation with emergent risks enables, and what possibilities it might foreclose. As securing the future necessarily raises the question, 'for whom?', I suggest that one troubling consequence of a preoccupation with security is the potential to overlook which lives and ways of being in the world might be neglected in the rush to secure others. The analysis draws on ethnographic interviews and observations to explore the (necro)biopolitical dimensions of pipeline debates, and asks how we might anticipate otherwise. of this paper. I extend my thanks to colleagues and teachers in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto for productive conversations about this work. I am indebted to many people in Ontario and Michigan for making this research possible. This paper benefited greatly from the insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers and the editors at Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

Resource-making controversies: Knowledge, anticipatory politics and economization of unconventional fossil fuels

“…Second, depositional heterogeneity complicates the invention of standard extraction technologies that could be applied to diverse basins without painstaking customization (Stevens, 2010). Finally, it also affects the processing, distribution and marketisation of end-products, for example, by risking the capacity of infrastructure such as refineries, processing plants and pipelines, or by complicating the regulation of market prices and environmental liabilities in relation to established fuels (Grant, 2014; Kama, 2013).…”

“…Attending to these unfolding politics makes it necessary to investigate the competing rationales and modes of action which mediate the deliberation of unconventional energy development – specifically, how such ‘anticipatory logics’ (Anderson, 2010) are forged in a confluence of indefinable futurities and deliberate invocations of the past. Recent studies of fracking and oil sands reveal, however, that logics such as precaution, prevention, preemption and preparedness are no longer exercised by regulatory and industry circles alone (Fleming and Reins, 2016; Grant, 2014; Kinchy, 2017). Instead, their authority to speak for ‘future presents’ is challenged by various other experts and non-experts, who may hold very different perceptions and epistemes of time (Bear, 2016; Szolucha, 2018).…”

“…As a 'process that is historical, contingent and disputable', economization and its outcomes are subject to intense 'trials of strength' which enlist various competing economic practitioners, but also their technical and institutional settings and the materiality of things entering valuation and market transactions (Callon et al, 2007: 3;Ç alışkan and Callon, 2010). What Mitchell (2013) identifies as the 'new politics of nature' inherent to the making of unconventionals therefore depends foremost on how the carbon economy will be collectively reworked vis-à-vis the material properties of the changing resource base and the associate infrastructures through which such new commodities are circulated (such as 'dilbit pipelines'; see Grant, 2014). Rather than being predetermined by the course of 'the market' as having some universal form of existence, economization is arguably co-performed by a variety of human and non-human agencies, yielding distinct outcomes in different places and times.…”

“…Geographers are now also joining other social scientists to address the dynamics of extractive politics across scale, noting how such struggles are played out around competing imaginations of territory and property, progress and modernization, social justice and future communities (e.g. Grant, 2014;Hesse et al, 2016;Kama, 2016;Sica, 2015;Steger and Milosevic, 2014;Zalik, 2015a). Evading deterministic accounts of unconventionals as the last resource frontier (Dannreuther and Ostrowski, 2013;Klare, 2012), this work is beginning to interrogate the ways in which their exploration is negotiated and affects resource governance in the context of prevailing uncertainty and public discontent, to yield often very different outcomes in different places.…”

Energy Justice and Canada’s National Energy Board: A Critical Analysis of the Line 9 Pipeline Decision

“…As discussed below, throughout the review process Indigenous and non-Indigenous people raised concerns about risks to the environment, human health and Indigenous rights-both along the Line 9 route and in solidarity with those affected by oil sands production in Alberta. Indigenous community members disrupted Line 9B hearings in protest, and Indigenous-led blockades and other direct actions followed the NEB's 2014 decision [44].…”